Lockdown on Rikers (10 page)

I'd never seen anything like this before. I had to get out of here. I grabbed the refusal form and scanned the beds for Daisy. “Hi, Mental Health!” she waved.

The manner in which she addressed me was irksome, and I disliked her all over again, but I managed a professional smile. “Daisy, I haven't seen you in a while.”

“I know,” she said, using her arms to hoist her legs over the edge of the cot. “I know you've been calling me, but I've been too sick to make that walk to the clinic. And now you came all the way down here to see me. I wanted to talk to you so bad—for my therapy. There's some chairs in the dayroom. Let's go.” She stood up slowly, steadying her small frame.

I felt a pang of guilt and folded up the refusal form.

“By the way,” she announced, as we sat down, “my name's not really Daisy Wilson. I have an aunt by that name who told my family not to let me in the house 'cause I was stealing stuff. On account of her, I wasn't allowed in my own mother's house. You believe that? But I got her back, all right—I took her name, so when the police are looking for me, they try and arrest her!”

Great!

After she recovered from a coughing fit, she waved her hand at the women in the cots. “These girls are disgusting. You really shouldn't talk to them—they're prostitutes,” she hissed. “They'd do anything for drug money. Trash! That's what they are.”

“But Daisy,” I pointed out gently, “you were addicted to drugs yourself.”

“True. But in all those years, I never, ever prostituted myself. I wasn't raised like that! What I did was—you know the parking lot behind Sears in Brooklyn?”

“No.”

“I'd go to the corner there, get into a car with an old man and let him think he was gonna get a blowjob.”

“Daisy! We need to talk about your illness and—”

“Oh, we'll get to that. So then, I'd tell him to go into the parking lot—this was at night, see, so there weren't any cars around. Then we'd park and he'd lean over to undo his fly, and I'd pull out my handy rock and
POW
—bash him in the head with it! I was good at it—one shot usually knocked 'em right out. Then I'd go through their pockets.”

“Daisy!”

“But it's very important that it's an old man,” she mused. “That's the trick.”

“Do you see anything wrong with this?” I asked, my anger growing.

“I'm just explaining to you that I was never a prostitute. I pretended to be, but I always stayed pure.”

“
Pure?!
You hurt people!”

“Afterwards I would take a cab home,” she said, ignoring me. “I always made the cabbie drive by the parking lot, and sometimes I'd see—you know, the flashing lights.”

“You may have killed someone.”

She said nothing but gave me an almost smile, and we both knew that she had.

When the session ended, I marched straight to Janet's office. When it came to Daisy Wilson, I was at a complete loss. She wasn't like anyone else I'd met. All of the others tried to justify or explain their criminal behavior, insisting that it didn't jibe with who they really were. But not Daisy. This is exactly who she was—and proud of it!

As I described Daisy and her boastful tales, Janet calmly sipped her tea. “You know what you have here, don't you? A remorseless conniver? No conscience?”

I hadn't yet put the pieces together, but in that moment I did. “A sociopath?”

“Yup. And you're right. She's not like the others—and never will be.”

With the revelation that I had a full-blown sociopath on my caseload, I naturally assumed Janet would deem me too inexperienced and relieve me of Daisy Wilson, forthwith. So I was stunned by what she said next: “This is good for you, Mary—a lot to learn here.”

A lot to learn!
“But Janet,” I said carefully, “I'm not sure I can handle this. I'm not helping her. I feel like she's in charge and I'm being dragged along for the ride.”

“Then take charge. Part of the reason you're having trouble is because you're expecting her to be something she's not. Stop being outraged. Get past it. Yes, she's a bad person, but look at it this way: she's the one sitting on Rikers Island dying of AIDS, and that's what you need to tap into. You're doing fine.”

I wasn't doing fine, not by a long shot. But I knew better than to argue with this stern taskmaster. Janet was a stickler about everything. If I wrote “Patient depressed” in a chart note, she handed the chart right back to me. “No, no, full sentences—‘Patient
presents
as depressed.'” The charts had to be as polished as Janet's carefully chosen suits. It was all becoming way too much.

But I wasn't completely without hope. My secret wish was that Daisy Wilson's Compassionate Release would come through and that she would just go home.

10

If my relationship with Daisy Wilson was going nowhere, my little adolescent group was picking up steam. Maybe it was to escape boredom, or maybe it was to enjoy a donut, but whatever the reason, when I arrived each week more of the girls were pulling chairs up to the group table. And as I became a familiar weekly figure, they took to calling me “Miss Mary.” That, however, is where the civility ended. As soon as I placed the donuts on the table, a mad lunge followed.
“Hey, that was my donut!” “Fuck you!”
Rather than getting upset, I repeated calming words: “There is always enough for everyone in our group. There is always enough.” When the scuffle ended, they sat back with squished donuts and scowled. Although the behavior was primitive I didn't mind. All I cared about was that they were coming—and even better, after the treats were gone, they were staying.

Coincidentally, I was taking a class on group therapy where I was learning more about group dynamics. The group is a powerful unit; its inherent draw is that it offers a sense of belonging, a universal human need—which explains much of the allure of gangs. Between my formal training and my own natural instincts, I approached this adolescent challenge with relish. In the early going, the mood of the group was light as the girls chatted, giggled, and talked about nothing in particular. I listened carefully, mindful of who was talking and who was silent. If someone was being overshadowed, I made sure she had her moment. I gave each speaker
my undivided attention and managed to offer relevant feedback so they knew they'd been heard. And as I focused on one person at a time, I noticed that the others started to keep quiet. I can't say they were actually listening, but they at least remained silent when someone else was speaking. I was surprised at how quickly this restraint developed, but I suspect it was because they realized that with this method they, too, could have their golden moment—their moment to be heard. And as I knew so well,
everyone needs to be heard.

These little rudiments of socialization were not only a beginning, but a necessity. If these girls were going to get anywhere in this world, they needed to develop a little basic courtesy—which was not part of their repertoire. Streetwise and battle-scarred, the crew around this table were products of the worst of foster care and group homes. Ebony grew up with a foster family who kept not only the refrigerator locked, but the entire house locked until midnight. Cast out to the streets, Ebony survived by working as a lookout for drug dealers. Peering around street corners and hovering on rooftops, her job was to watch for approaching police. A modern-day Artful Dodger, Ebony lived by her wits and intuition. The others did the same, struggling to survive, growing up way too fast. But behind their tough bravado, in many ways they were still children.

Over the next few weeks, we continued our pattern of gathering together and simply taking turns speaking. And then a new bud developed—they began offering bits of feedback to the speaker, glancing at me for approval, which I happily provided.

Of course, things were going just a little too smoothly. One evening, a girl named Carly announced her arrival by pounding her fist on the table and accusing a bewildered-looking Tonisha of the great jailhouse insult: calling Carly's mother a crackhead. In any other setting, I would have laughed off such nonsense, but not in here. If they had the means, these girls were fully capable of pulling a knife to avenge this perceived slight. In the neighborhoods where they grew up, people were stabbed for less—for failing to
say “excuse me” or for accidentally stepping on a sneaker. Among these girls, an accusation like this was serious business. As Carly got louder, chairs scudded back from the table. Anticipating a scuffle, the officer ran out of the bubble, radio in hand. Despite the mounting tension, I was determined to stay calm and use our new tools to handle this. Projecting a composure that I did not feel, I said, “Carly, you seem to be very upset about this.”

“Oh, I am! You don't say that about somebody's mother—you just don't.”

“But I didn't say it!” Tonisha protested.

The girls looked a little bewildered, not sure whether to rumble or weigh in with their thoughts on the matter.

“So, Tonisha,” I continued, “you feel you're not getting a fair shake?”

“That's right—I'm not!”

And then Veronica, a quiet girl with long braids, pulled back up to the table and said, “I think everybody needs to just calm down.”

“Yeah—no point doin' something stupid, Carly,” added a sweet-faced girl nicknamed Polite. “You don't know for sure Tonisha even said it!”

With the scales tipping toward discussion, they all quietly pulled back up to the table.

Carly sat with folded arms. “Oh, she said it all right!” But the steam was gone.

“Besides,” added Ebony, “wouldn't it be nice to have five minutes of peace in here? Just five minutes. Wow! Amazing!”

When the hour ended, Carly and Tonisha refused to look at one another but left the table in peace, and the others quietly dispersed. The fight never happened. At the bubble, the shocked officer shook her head. “Could you come here every night?
Please!
”

It was a triumphant walk back to the clinic.

After that pivotal session, a new trend developed whereby the girls saved up the slights and insults they'd suffered during the week and brought them to the table for arbitration, knowing that the
group offered a safe forum for feelings to be expressed and hurts to be acknowledged. A breakthrough had occurred, and every girl around that table knew it. And as the group evolved, there were other changes. For one thing, the mad grab for donuts ended. Instead, they took to passing the box around with exaggerated British accents: “Aftah you, dahling,” “Ewh no, but I insist!” It was hard for me to keep a straight face and they knew it, very much enjoying entertaining me.

These were happy moments, but the best news of all came when Janet called me into her office and told me it was official, that DOC had reported a dramatic reduction in violence on the problematic unit.

“Isn't that something?” Janet beamed. “They're growing, Mary! And here's the proof!”

I was thrilled. People don't really want to fight. They just need a way to handle their differences without losing face.

* * *

In every way, the adolescent group was a joy. I only wished the same for the nursery, but the babies never stopped crying and the mothers were perpetually exhausted, so we muddled through as best we could. But one blustery afternoon, a terrible shock awaited when Allison and I arrived to find everyone gathered in the living room, weeping.

“Miss B,” Addie cried, “it's Millie—Millie's dead!”

“What! Millie Gittens? What do you mean she's dead?”

“Apparently,” said a slack-faced Camille Baxter, “Millie never made it to that program. They picked up the baby, all right—but somehow Millie wound up right back on the streets. We got word this morning from one of the nurses that she died in a crack house. The nurse knows her people and said they found her body yesterday afternoon. She overdosed.”

My eyes were stinging and my mind was whirling. Millie Gittens was dead! I wanted to sit down and cry with everyone else,
but I had to hold it together. The mothers needed this group, and with an intensity I'd never seen before, they talked, cried, and even smiled, recalling the good and bad about poor Millie.

“And here we thought Millie was so lucky to be getting out of here,” Addie mused. “Turns out jail was the best place for her to be.”

“Maybe not the worst place for us, either,” whispered Marisol.

“Better than dying in some crack house,” voiced another.

As they rocked and clung to subdued babies, each one knew that Millie's fate could just as easily have been her own.

Back at the conference room, my own tears started flowing, and Wendy and Allison comforted me. Inevitably, I wondered if I'd given up on her too soon. “No, Mary, you did everything you could,” said Wendy. “You went above and beyond for her,” said Allison. From our car-ride conversations, Wendy and Allison knew all too well about my “Millie struggle,” and I appreciated their words. In my heart I knew they were right. All I could do now was say a prayer for Calvin, who would go into foster care in preparation for adoption. I just hoped the sweet little boy would fall into loving hands.

In the days following the news of Millie's death, I took new stock of my relationships with these women and stepped up my efforts to help them. There was so much at stake, and this window of intervention into chaotic lives had to be maximized. I was especially concerned with Rhonda Reynolds, who was unraveling. Gone were the pigtails, fuzzy headgear, and waiting room hijinks. “The police lied to me!” she cried. “They said all I had to do was tell the truth and everything would be okay. And I did—I told the truth about that girl jumping on me, and now I'm going to prison! They lied! I'm so stressed—and these nightmares aren't going away. I need sleeping pills!”

“Rhonda, isn't it time you gave up on the pills? Whatever it is that happened to you,” I said softly, “I'd like to help you with it.”

She looked up at me, beads of sweat trickling through her scalp.

“You come here every week, faithfully,” I said, “for a reason. I think you know me well enough by now that you can trust me.”

“You want me to tell you about the nightmares? You really want me to tell you?”

“Yes, I do, Rhonda. It's time. Let me help you.”

“I wanted to tell someone when it happened, but nobody listened to me. Nobody cared!”

“Someone is listening now.”

“All right,” she quivered. “All right then! I'll tell you . . . I'll tell you. The blood I dream about—it was my blood. Something happened. Something bad—real bad.”

With a faraway look, Rhonda finally began. “It happened a couple of years ago. I was gettin' high a lot, you know, smokin' weed, whatnot, and this one afternoon in the summer I see this guy comin' down the street. I'd seen him around the neighborhood, and I ask him if he wants to party. So he comes in and we smoke weed, and then he pulls out some cocaine—crack—and we smoke that too. We were pretty high, everything goin' fine. And when it's over, I go to the door to let him out, and he jumps on my back, and I'm like,
What?
Then he pulls me down to the floor and starts punching me, punching me hard—hard! In my face, in my stomach, everywhere.
Oh, God.
I didn't know what was happening. And then he tore off my clothes—and raped me.
He raped me!
And then . . . he just got up and walked out the door like nothing—
like absolutely nothing.
And when I tried to get up, I couldn't. My legs, my arms, they were just sliding around in blood. When my daughter came in, I was naked, laying in my own blood. It was horrible for her to see me like that. She was only six.

“I told her to throw a sheet over me and call 911. When the police came it got worse. There was three or four cops, and at first they didn't even want to call an ambulance. They just stood around drinking coffee and telling jokes. They were laughing at me—
laughing!
They told me to get up, that I was faking it. They said I wasn't even worth the paperwork, that I was just a piece of . . . of
garbage. When they finally called the ambulance and I got to the hospital, I was on a gurney that got pushed into a corner—like a shopping cart. The cops were joking around with the nurses, like I wasn't even there. Everyone just ignored me.”

As Rhonda's horrible ordeal poured out, my own eyes were stinging.

She glanced up at me and saw the tears. “Heh,” she whispered, fixing her gaze at the floor. “Just another nigger.”

“Oh, Rhonda! No! Oh, no! You are a human being, and
nothing less!
The guy who did this to you—and the police and the nurses—they're the ones who should be ashamed, not you!”

She looked up at me for a moment, a glimmer of hope in her tear-filled eyes. “But that's just it, Miss Buser—it was my fault.
I let him in!
”

“You let him in to party with you—not to attack you!”

She thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “I was in the hospital—in rehab—for five months, just learning to walk again.”

“My God, Rhonda. You've been through hell. I can't believe you haven't told anyone about this.”

“I didn't think anyone would care.”

Out in the clinic, Overton was announcing the start of the afternoon count. I went out to his desk and asked that Rhonda be included on the clinic count so she wouldn't have to leave just then. I returned and sat with her, just the two of us. When she was finally cried out, she let out a deep breath and sighed. “Well, you wanted to know.”

“I know it wasn't easy for you to relive this, Rhonda,” I said softly, “but it needed to come out.”

“Yeah,” she sniffled. “Yeah, I know. I think I'd like to go lay down now.”

After she left, I returned to the session booth and sat for a while, barely able to comprehend the horror of what Rhonda had endured. The inhumanity of it—not only from the rapist, but from the police and hospital staff—was incomprehensible. To the police, Rhonda was a skel, not quite a real person, undeserving of any
human compassion. And it wasn't lost on me that if I or any of my friends had been so brutally assaulted, the police response would have been entirely different. And Rhonda Reynolds's agony was no less simply because she was poor, Black, and a drug addict.